Like me, I expect the last couple of months have probably been for you a time of anxiety, sadness, anger and fear all rolled into one. September 11th 2001 will be indelibly etched in our memories, and the awful images of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsing...
This summer I was invited by two British doctors, Noj and Mary Northway working at Berega Anglican Mission Hospital near Morogoro in central eastern Tanzania, to teach their staff some practical paediatric skills. After several quite unsettled years at the hospital, they felt that the staff were now ready to...
A ANALYSE YOUR MOTIVES 'It made me want to go back home and become a good doctor so that I could come back here again.' 'It was quite simply the best part of my training.' These quotations from recent elective reports sound incongruous in the context of a nation where one in...
A visit to the "Lost Gardens of Heligan" in Cornwall was an amazement to me. To see people re-capturing the vision of those who had laid the gardens out so long ago brought to my mind Rushere Hospital in Ankole, Uganda. Just over a year ago, I was invited to join...
Psalm 38: 10 'My heart pounds, my strength fails me, even the light has gone from my eye.' The idea of palliative care is still a relatively new one for East Africa. A definition of palliative care is the 'provision of care for people with an illness for which...
Four months before my elective I began to despair and asked my medical school for an extension on my project protocol deadline. I had started writing to various organisations 16 months before I was due to take my elective, but they had all replied that an elective was not possible....